


my last confession, I love you never felt like any blessing

by starraya



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Post-Episode: s07e05 The Angels Take Manhattan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-01
Updated: 2014-11-01
Packaged: 2018-02-23 12:56:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2548286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starraya/pseuds/starraya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'“That was low,” River’s voice is murderous but there is no hate in it. That would be far to kind on him. There is just love, and all its disappointments. “What was? River! Please, pray tell because I’m sick of riddles!” The Doctor flips off ancient engineering goggles revealing eyes devoid of anything but that cold and tired feeling.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	my last confession, I love you never felt like any blessing

 

By the time The Doctor returns to the TARDIS Amelia’s afterword is in his hands and the console room is desolate.

He does not know if River is still aboard or has left him.

 _'One psychopath per TARDIS, don’t you think?'_   Hope surged inside him at the thought of River and him and just a box and the sky. It withered. Just an hour ago they were going out; it was Ponds and Video Games and a secret plan to get drunk in an quaint little English pub after - enough to sneak his arm round his wife’s neck, kiss her, tell her how beautiful she was -- and set about fixing whatever had broken between them. It had been normality to . . . nothing, just like that awful moment in New York when he flipped to the chapter titles and read Death at Winter Quay. How did they all expect him to react? Not get angry? Not feel sick and old and useless because this is what always happens? He loses all of his companions. They’re the best parts of him and every one of them is torn off him and every time he returns to his empty TARDIS where there is just an engine whirl and him.

No River with him. No difference to the times before.

He slams his hands against the edge of the TARDIS in frustrated grief, huffing "Locate River Song" to see if she is still aboard and pulling the screen around for the answer. Upon it flashes: 'request failed to run'. His voice surges at the denied access; he owns a Type-40 TARDIS for goodness sake! The screen goes black. It is a protest from the Old Girl. _You do not own me._ Of course, he forgets the TARDIS is telepathic to both him and River. He caresses the corner of the screen in apology. Gently, in an exhausted voice he explains: "She has to be somewhere, the library, our bedroom. . ."

The TARDIS, it seems, has decided to forgive him. She doesn’t want him to be alone any more than he does. A message soon flashes upon the screen: "Song, River: 4:03 to 4:19, today, wardrobe."

"Yes but where is she now? Is she still aboard?"

"Confirmed."

"Checking up on me?" The Doctor nearly jumps at the voice, the ice in it. He spins around on the balls of his feet to face the questioner. River has showered and changed. Her hair is tied back and damp and she’s dressed in jeans and a plain T-shirt. She has never looked so un-River and so normal he thinks.

“River, I was just. . .” He tries to explain. The screen remains bright with her previous location. An overwhelming sense of guilt floods over him like he’s invaded her privacy, likes he’s a child that couldn’t be without an adult alone.

“Just what?” Her voice is level, her make-up free face as blank as before he went to fetch Amy’s afterword.

“You’ve just lost your parents!” It bursts out of him in a horrible yell, accusingly, as if she’s no right to not break down like he is and no right to just dismiss the fact and soldier on. As if he can't stand to watch her to just. . .accept it and as if that is evidence of a criminal, an enemy before him. River eyes narrow in some sort of warning. _Don’t judge me. Don’t ever think you can do that._ Stoic, wordless, she strides past him. He grabs her hand, stopping her. Turning back round, River glares at the hand round her wrist but she refuses to struggle against his grip and yank her hand away. Passively, she waits for him to release her as he softly says, “I want to be. . . there for you.”

They both know he is no state. He’s too anguished. He’s too emotional; he remembers her future words to his tenth incarnation in the library after losing Donna. But, damn it, his eleventh incarnation curses inwardly. Amy and Rory are gone. Forever. Emotional is too light a word for his turmoil. So, for all his sentiment in them, his next words hiss sharply at her.

“Isn’t that what you’re meant to do, for the people you . . . care about?” River's eyes drop to the floor.

As his question reverberates around the console room he murmurs: “I’m sorry.” He doesn’t know everything he should apologise for.

“So am I,” she replies and he knows what for. As soon as he lets her go she’ll disappear. “River,” he starts again, “I meant it. I want to be there for you.” Besides he needs her. She can’t leave. Not now. Not after all this time. She reads the hope and dependence on his face, frowns.

“Only when and wherever you like?” She throws back her earlier –- once wistful words at travelling with him -- in scorn. Images of all those times he never was there for her, never could save her, from little Melody Pond to the Library flash before him and his grip slips. There is no point arguing with her. She’s right. Why start trying to be there for her now? She doesn’t want it. She isn’t used to it. The pain of her slap back in New York is not even a memory for him yet. Freed, she storms to the TARDIS’s exit. She is lost.

But he still calls after her like he always has. “Where are you going, River. River!” He rushes after her only for the doors to shut before he reaches the pathway to them.

 _Let her go,_ he hears the machine whisper. _For now, let her go._

So he does. Returning to the console, he loosens the bow tie round his neck suddenly too tight and pulls a lever that transports him away into the deep solitude of space and time. That’s when it clicks; when River piloted them away from the graveyard she’d also been entering new co-ordinates for her destination. She’d always planned on leaving him.

That night he journeys to their room, sees the huge, empty bed and, softly closing the door, retreats.

* * *

 They run into each other. They’re faced with different versions and different arguments and different secrets to keep. Fate is obdurate like that. One time The Doctor has Amy and Rory with him . . .  _just across the market if River wants to join them by the way_. River flees. For him, there is University River, the wild, volatile and more self-conscious than she’ll ever let on student then the long-time professor, married and every inch the hurricane she always was. All he can think is: _I’ve lost you your parents –- twice. Why are still with me? Flirting? Running? Why were you ever? I orphaned you._ Soon her younger self thinks she’s done something wrong for his exasperated state whilst older River wants to know what in the name of Gallifrey he’s done this time that’s caused his self-pity. The first gets defensive and the second actually quite offensive in her interrogation of him but the understanding in her eyes - the one not yet grown in her former self's -  the touch of her hand on his back when he closes up tells him that whatever the answer turns out to be it couldn’t possibly change things after all that’s happened. He can’t stand it and flees himself.

In the long time they aren’t linear they play the guilt game of spoilers they always have until the day done-Manhattan River whips into the TARDIS by means unknown to him since he’s hidden away  in the most uninhabitable desert in the surrounding seven galaxies, one full of sandstorms and frequency distortions. It is a recluse where even the the vortex manipulator wouldn't work. (He should really think about somewhere a lot less hot. It’s not kind on the engines. Perhaps somewhere rainy. An outer atmosphere, perhaps, clouds?)

“What’s happened? What have you done to her?” River shouts. Caught unawares, he clumsily pops up from underneath the console floor with the lines of Manhattan as much on his face as hers. They crease into the question of _just what in the name of Gallifrey’s gotten into you?_ He falters from transforming that exact expression into words however as her figure rushes to the console and checks the screen by deftly typing commands until slowly, hesitatingly she stops, assured. She steps into  and explores the nearest corridor returning when it is to her approval.

Murderously quiet.

“Oh, the lack of light,” he gestures to his eerily dim surroundings, the half-running engines that, for the typical day to day exertions of them, are all but dormant. Sexy started doing it to save energy when no one was around but him.

“I don’t really notice it myself anymore.” Wrong words. Her pupils spin, flashing in relief and suspicion; they’re each a dagger of the aforesaid when they strike him though the barrier of greyness between them both.

“That was low,” River’s voice is murderous, but there is no hate in it. That would be far to kind on him. There is just love, and all its disappointments.

“What was? River! Please, pray tell because I’m sick of riddles!” The Doctor flips off ancient engineering goggles revealing eyes devoid of anything but that cold and tired feeling.

“There was a distress signal for this time, this place,” she doesn’t tell him anymore. He can guess though. Whatever was sent was strong. He hasn’t seen her so fearful in a long while.

“Well, everything’s fine,” he studies her, "the Old Girl misses you, she’s fed up with me but hey, she should be used to it by now.” _Losing all those companions over the years, those guests, and those not-guests. You,_ he wants to add.

“Well find someone new for her then,” River says simply and, before he can proclaim he doesn’t want someone new, she’s leaving him and pushing at the TARDIS doors. Or at least trying. They won’t budge. Her head snaps round to his, fiercely accusing of him an innumerable amount of crimes, not lest his imprisonment of her on his ship.  Immediately, he raises his hands either side of his head in innocence then clenches his fists reminding himself he’s not the culprit here, or not at least for this crime.

The lights turn on flooding a perfectly healthy and independent Type-40 TARDIS. Shut tight. 

“Don’t you dare!” Still struggling against the doors, River commands her. She doesn’t need to try her Vortex Manipulator to know it is disabled but does so regardless. Defeated, she turns back round to face her husband, presses her back to the doors and slides down until she’s sitting against the jammed doors. They are confronted at last with nothing but stale despair and cowardice between them, unbearable years of it, of avoiding secrets and future versions of each other. New York. Emptiness. And expectations that neither of them want to fulfil.

Because what are they meant to do now? How are they meant to start normality? Start grieving? How do enemies and soldiers and orphans grieve?

When co-ordinates bleep on the screen above the console in answer, The Doctor stamps them in, yanks the controls with just enough exasperation at their relationship that it doesn’t stop him from instinctively reaching for River when the time machine violently catapults them into space. The lights die. The machine literally falls asleep on some unknown destination with the married couple inside her. Despite the darkness, The Doctor stretches out his hand to help River as he hears her startled curse. But they can do nothing but endure the turbulence of the ride as the vessel loses its control over itself willingly until there is no life in the engines. Not crashing seems a near-impossibility. They hurtle through time; he loses his hold on the console, then his footing. Neither of them is sure who falls into the others arms first, only that it’s the closet embrace they’re had in months. A few seconds of gathering themselves and extracting arms from the others hold, a thump and then all is still. They stand apart, waiting for the TARDIS to reawaken, light, breathe. Before they can get worried or angry there is a message. The TARDIS doors open. The Doctor and River share a mirrored look precisely reading: you wait until I know which of us pre-planned this.

Nonetheless there is an impatient whirl from the engines; never has the feeling of relief at the TARDIS’s obvious safety and the feeling of being kicked out been so acute. River and the Doctor step through the doors and into the crowd outside. The doors lock behind them even though he hasn’t even had time to grab his screwdriver he put down mid-way through tinkering with the TARDIS whilst she has no gun after she left midway through paperwork at Luna University in such a hurry to check the TARDIS. So they have no defences which they soon find out seconds after stepping into an unknown land and reaching for the familiar shape of their weapons instinctively. Whatever their deprivation of they still manage to source and borrow acceptable clothes for the era she argues is Janderian and he the just entered rule of their successors, the Jydathians.

They never end up caring about which one of them is right.

* * *

They drink far too much. They dance far too long –- they take part in every one –- then, inevitably, trouble follows them. 187 gasps, two chandeliers smashed to the floor, one scandal of the season in the form of a royal assassination attempt, to which The Doctor and River are both detectives and suspects to, later and they tumble into their blue-boxed home. They are a mess of warm, loosened limbs, breathy laughs and bruises that won’t be felt until morning. Their disentangling attempts only led to further entangling with him half on her, her half entwined with him. _Story of their marriage_ the TARDIS muses over them with a smile. _Her thief and daughter interwoven like a scarf._

“Oh shuuuutt up,” an extremely intoxicated River yells, sprawled beneath her husband on the TARDIS floor, at the sounds outside. Her fingers click the doors shut so the sounds of madness and violins and gunfire are effortlessly blocked out. “Yes,shut up,” The Doctor agrees, even more intoxicated.  His mouth finds the flushed skin of her neck, trails kisses along her collarbone. They don’t hear the TARDIS materialising away to some secret alcove of the universe only for them. In another part of the universe they will be tomorrow’s newspaper headlines; they will be gossip, history, myth for someone to forget or remember -- like they always are. Now, now their lips crush the others to open like flowers to an overdue spring, vibrant and hopeless, believing winter cannot possibly return when summer tastes so sweet. Just before dawn they fall asleep in exhaustion twisted into the sheets of a bed. They never made it back down all the corridors to their bedroom.

Bleary-eyed, The Doctor wakes up a couple of hours later. Cold prickles his skin. Maybe the TARDIS needed to lower the temperature levels to recuperate some energy exerted after whisking him and River away twice by her own accord without any pilot’s directions or mysterious summons. Or maybe the old girl just doesn’t have in it her anymore, maybe she’s getting old. Or maybe he’s just getting old and imagining things. The heat and light that blinded him from River's download to the library data core were, after all, so unbearably hot in his dream. _Are you cold River?_  He thinks. Stupid question when she’s asleep, safe and real, making little, breathy sounds that fluctuate to the fall and rise of her chest –- he checks. He scrambles to find his screwdriver tripping over one of her heels to get to it and point the device to the fireplace constructed at the end of the room. Blistering and green, flames alight. They’ll have to do. His fingers lace round a curl of River’s hair that is as soft of stardust. Solemnly, almost like it is only now just an accepted realisation, a renewed promise, an explanation for his behaviour, he whispers Gallifreyan into the darkness: “You’re my wife; I won’t lose you.” The air becomes heavy and stifling with his admission. Before the feeling of powerlessness that always consumes him into a maddened monster at the ever-increasing thoughts of River’s impending journey to the library sleep finds him and pulls the frightened man under.

The unnatural flames go out soon after.

By morning, the temperature aboard has returned to a regulated height. River and her clothes are gone. Wiping crumbs of sleep from his eyes The Doctor doesn’t jump up to try and track her. He knows well she has probably left the ship. As he sits up his fingertips brush the coldness on her side of the bed. Was he expecting her to stay? Apart from last night they’d hardly maintained a civil conversation for more than ten minutes let alone such light, old-time banter once they started dancing -- and drinking he reminds himself. A nauseous feeling washes over him when he rises to get out of bed. His head aches. He’s rewarded, when he makes it to a neighbouring bathroom, with a dishevelled reflection obscured by funny red marks in the mirror. On the shelf above the sink there’s a discarded stub of uncapped lipstick. Ruined, beyond doubt. Like the mirror. For, in a peeling shade of crimson, there is a scrawl River's hand: co-ordinates.

The Doctor rushes to get dressed.

He ends up parked on a cliff-side of Cauderon Beta. A sea breeze slithers under his shirt and trousers the instant he steps out the TARDIS. On one of the large rocks atop the grassy surface of the cliff is a plate of buttered scones, a pot of jam and two cups of teas steaming with domesticity. Beside them, body draped leisurely over the large rock as it were a plush throne, is River. “You haven’t gone,” he murmurs inaudibly, still slightly incredulous to the sight before him. He may trust the woman in front of him with his life but staying to morning is not what either of them have faith in when it comes to the other. They always just fall into and out each other’s lives, driftwood caught and spun by two storms. Since the Ponds' departure however, the storms become one more often. They also tame for longer and for once River and the Doctor seemed to have found themselves in the eye of it.

“Morning,” glancing up from the cup of tea, cupped within her hands, that she’s trying to cool with puffs of her breath she smiles at him.

“Morning, Song,” he beams back at her. They will never admit it but they have both slept longer than usual way into the late, late afternoon, perhaps the evening of the day. Yet here, it’s night. Well night by the planet’s own standards. For most of the day there is little daylight sun so, presently, it’s a dark dusk: night-time. The starlight is so bright here it is the daylight. He took newly imprisoned River here on heir first date. It was 2360: the starriest night in history. He doesn’t know the year for this date. _Somewhere mid-34th century perhaps by the species of that plant over there?_ They’re nowhere near the paramount viewing point, that’s another cliff way off, he knows that much. There’s not a 400 ft tree anywhere beside them. He’s glad for it. He's, for all his want of the familiarity and seclusion the planet can bring, in no mood for that one repetition of the past. Beginnings always remind him of ends these days.

There are three candle-lit lanterns by River. He doesn’t need or care for impressive or majestic anymore. They’ve already seen everything of the type together, already seen more stars than most world populations have collectively. However, the iridescence of the candles' rippling light and their shadows, outlining and blurring the figure of his wife in the dark evening . . . The Doctor’s eyes have never been contented with such perfect simplicity.

“Finally woke up then,” she gives him a knowing look at his hastily attired clothes,  at the absence of any shoes on his feet, at his creased shirt from last night and some too short trousers he fished out when he couldn’t find yesterday’s. For a moment the Doctor is too memorized by the reflections of the candles blazing over his wife's eyes to respond to the teasing in her voice.

“Mmm. . . breakfast by candlelight,” he finally breaks out from his stupor, ‘never had that one before . . . and, you know, I really liked that looking glass.”

“No you didn’t,” she quips back. Persistently, the wind sneaks again under his thin layer of clothes and he wraps his arms round himself, realises it looks stupid and pushes them down by his sides.

“You really might want to put on a jacket," River advises him. "It seems as though someone didn’t check the planet’s vitals this time.” He curses his early past selves for showing off one time too many by neglecting to check the vitals by nothing but his senses once he'd stepped outside the TARDIS. He laughs at the memories and River’s audacity. _You really might want to put on a jacket._ It seems they have defaulted to the comfortable mode of flirtation, something he is more than willing to enjoy. (And so, without even trying, without a closer look back at the past, they both run away from the confrontational truths left to poison their lips. After all, he fixed her broken wrist artificially months ago.)

“I really liked that jacket too,” The Doctor gives River an accusing look.

“Oh, Sweetie, I know you still do,” she purrs back, smoothing down the front of the tuxedo jacket she liberated from his ownership this morning for more than adding warmth to the jewelled, emerald gown she’s now reclaimed after he liberated it from her ownership the night before. The clothes weren’t even theirs to liberate in the beginning.

“I don’t know. I think you’re more of a tweed girl myself.” The tease tastes like sugar on his tongue. Scooping up a scone and forgetting his coldness, he joins her on the rock. “Aren’t elbow patches also mandatory for professors?”

“Husband shut up,” not looking up from the scone she’s spreading lavishly with jam, River reprimands him.

“Not a chance, dear,” he struggles to reply firmly with a mouthful of his breakfast. After his third scone, he rubs his temples at the pushy headache still there.

“It’s the cherry drink from last night, non-alcoholic mind you but it plays with your system. It might have given you an unintended equivalent to a sugar rush, with sickly aftertastes,” River explains to him clearly  suffering the same after effects.

“How are you?”

“I can handle drink, drugs? Not so much. Stimulants, hallucinogens . . . without a doubt the work of the would-be assassins. Make the crowd so distracted, so to call it, that they are the distractions.”

“Well my money was on the Jacqual all along. He disappeared far too often and his cat eyes were nothing but alert. I think he was the only sober one there. And there were traces of the drink in his room when I broke in it, same one poured in the Queen’s goblet.”

“So that’s where you disappeared off to.”

“Yes, whilst you were pallying with the King.”

“Interviewing,” she laughs at the jealously in his voice.

“And, did he or not turn out to be the one who nearly poisoned his wife?”

“Inadvertently. He never meant to harm her, he’d just befriended the wrong Jacqual and was very drunk and very foolish,” The Doctor defends the King but those hints of jealously still remain when he does.

“And very loyal to his wife,” River injects as a reminder. “He wouldn’t have believed the Jacqual that the Queen, Empress of the 14 Islands, liberator of the Jan colonies, ruler of a Kingdom finally at peace -- and her arranged marriage finally at peace too -- would have taken her own life at the height of her reign."

“I knew all along it wasn’t the King.”

“No you didn’t. You’d all but put handcuffs on him by the time the second chandelier smashed.” From then on they argue who cracked the case first but it falls away into banter and then into comfortable silence. Soon they finish the plate of scones. When their hands are sticky with jam, making it difficult for them to wipe the crumbs off their creased clothes, the pot is left with but with two sparing scone-layers of the crushed fruit with more on the knife that balances precariously on the rim of the jar. The teas are warm in their insides. When the cutlery and pot of jam are abandoned on the rock together on the floor they sit back against it. Grass stains and dirt smudge into their worn clothes.

Soon they blow out the candles in preparation for the illuminations of the starlight. It's set to be partly cloudy so the light will be broken and sparkling but still there, surviving and blinking over them. Without hesitation The Doctor takes River's hand under the tartan blanket covering them. (It appears as though River has thought of everything.) In silence The Doctor wraps one arm round his wife's back pulling her closer to him. With a long exhale she presses closer to him. Neither of them talks whilst each star aligns in its place above them. She thinks that expedition to The Library she’s been weighing up in her mind for the past week is too unimportant to mention . . . _she might not take it anyway and he no longer really asks about her trips and excavations._

So, tonight he doesn’t tense over at the mention of his wife’s imminent death. Think about all the ways to avoid it that wouldn’t work and think about all the other deaths she could have had. Think about how’ll she die alone and how, in one instant, all their nights and dances and spoilers will fall to nothing.

It will destroy him.

Whatever the day is it here either, it isn’t the day she stops wearing white over in the Library data-core. There isn’t the yell of _I never asked for eternity from you_ swelling inside the prison of her ribcage. And today River doesn’t tell him of the phone call she received at Luna University, the one that sent her running to the TARDIS. It wasn’t a trick or ploy of the TARDIS. The whispers and the hologram of a dead TARDIS on some barren planet makes it seem the Great Intelligence had been trying to slowly lure the Doctor’s loved ones to Trenzalore for so long back in his time-stream that she’d been alive when they’d begun.

But that night on Trenzalore is a long way off. Tonight is just tonight. There is no need for any admittance of loss or injury just like there is no need for longing words of endearment. There is just one for the sound of his hearts thrumming as they he shifts silently further under the blankets protection and  River further to him. She lets herself be cradled by her husband, if only until the dawn that promised them such freedom and power centuries before cloudlessly breaks upon them as fresh and bright and reminding as a new bruise --

in a universe disobedient to silence and faithless to illusions.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from 'Heavy in Your Arms' by Florence + the Machine. 
> 
> I apologise for any spelling/ grammar/ punctuation mistakes. I've proof-read until the words went funny but SPAG mistakes always seem to slip through (even though I've halved the original size of the story that has been ashamedly accumulating for months and months since the episode.) 
> 
> If one person enjoys it it'll be worth it.


End file.
